We’ve all heard the saying that content is king, meaning he who can produce the most content over his lifetime of selling online will make the most money. Certainly, with all the people out there who are scrambling to either write constantly or find places where they can get content cheaply, you would tend to believe that this statement is certainly true.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way minimizing how important content is. But you know what? I am not so egotistical to think that this is all that you need. Unfortunately, while content may be king, demand is the queen.

Demand; it’s one half of the law of supply and demand. If you didn’t go to college and take a course in economics, then this brief little explanation should be enough for you to understand the concept.

Supply and demand is really a very simple concept. But in order to really make it as easy as possible for you to understand, I’m going to give you an example of how powerful supply and demand really is. This will serve you much better than a long drawn out and BORING explanation.

John Doe has a widget. But he has only ONE widget. It turns out that this widget will earn somebody $100,000 a year. Everybody wants this widget. But there is only one. So John Doe decides to put it up for bidding at an auction. The bidding goes out of control.

People are bidding enough for this widget that it would cost 6 or 7 years of that $100,000 a year income. But they realize that they’ll be working at least 25 years using this widget, so even paying $500,000 for it will be worth it.

Suddenly, in the middle of the bidding war, Jim Smith comes out with an almost identical widget but has 1000 of them available. He sees the current bid is $400,000 so he decides to sell each of his widgets for $250,000. Well guess what? All of a sudden, John Doe’s widget isn’t as much in demand because there are 1000 other widgets that are just as good and for a lot cheaper. So the demand for John Doe’s widget goes down. So, he has 2 choices.

He can stick to his guns and try to still sell the widget for $500,000, saying that his is better, or he can lower his price and try to undercut the competition. But the problem is, he knows that if he just uses his widget for a year he’ll make at least $100,000, so he can’t lower it too much or he won’t really be making any money and at worst, he’ll lose money.

If the supply is high and the demand is low, then you won’t be able to sell the item for as high a price as if the supply were low and the demand were high. However, even if the supply is high, if the demand is still high, you can still sell at a fairly high price. You may not be able to sell it at as high a price if the supply was low, but still, demand is that powerful.

The point I am trying to illustrate is this. If you put out tons of content to promote an item, but there is no demand for that item, or very little, you won’t be able to sell it for much and you probably won’t make that many sales to begin with. So, all the content in the world can’t overcome a low demand. This holds especially true if you wanted to sell your content.

It doesn’t matter if you only wrote a few articles on a subject or many. If there is no demand for what you are selling, you’d be lucky to be able to give those articles away.

So while content may be king, demand is the queen.

© Neil-Harvey.com